Friday, 5 July 2013

Making Your Wickdly Fertile Imagination Work

Every so often when I'm in the middle of a project - in this case a play - I find scraps of notes I've made for myself that make - or made - sense to me then but now, if I were to take each separately and without context, I could probably create a wholly new piece of work.

Possibly surreal, if you look at the list above.

But it makes me feel so fortunate that I am in a job that needs imagination, lateral thinking, a slight "madness of the heart and soul and tiptoe crazy on the moon" (to quote one of my characters, Eve from Salt on Our Skin).

Even so, making yourself do the work that will birth the characters, language, dialogue, visuals, relationships, stories can be hard, can be frustrating. Not least when you do get down to it and hate yourself for having wasted so much time to get there.

But is there such a thing as wasted time - are our brains ticking over, working it out, storing something magical there to reward us with? I hope so because sometimes I find myself circling the work like a nervous crow, picking it up, putting it down, doing anything else, faffing as if it were a new and lucrative art form...

Two bits of advice that have kept me sane:
1. Don't expect everything you write to be good. You have to get the abysmal stuff out of you too! If you expect to write something magnificent every time, fear will stop you from writing, allow you to procrastinate into a state of utter frustration and dislike, and the disappointment of the bad stuff you do write might discourage you from ever finishing a piece of work. Just get the words down - nobody else can.

2. Do up a schedule of small tasks, single steps that will allow you to do the writing work you want to do and keep to it (more or less) religiously, unless you get so into the writing that you get carried away, which is one of the most wonderful feelings in the world.

These tasks could be to brainstorm a character, a scene, an element of the narrative; to list out the chapters and see what happens in each; to pick up something that is bothering you about the project and see where it goes; to edit one chapter, one scene, the first ten minutes of a script - or the last; anything that allows you to build up the project and prevents you from being daunted by its sheer size...

They say you can only truly enjoy freedom when it's scheduled in - which seems bizarre but think of how good that walk/ chocolate/ next chapter of the book you're dying to read will feel if you've actually made some headway into your current writing project? How good you will feel about yourself.

In other words, reward your fertile imagination by giving it space in which to grow.

Just to Make You Smile

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About Lindsay Jane Sedgwick

A former journalist, Lindsay Jane Sedgwick is a versatile and imaginative writer who has had drama and children’s material broadcast on TV for RTE; the latest of which is the internationally award-winning PUNKY, an animated series first broadcast on RTEJr in May 2012. It sold globally, from New Zealand to the US to S. Korea and many territories in between. A second series launched in Feb2014. She is currently developing her new series WULFIE with Monster Entertainment and Media funding. rewriting an animation feature (with IFB support), waiting for her romantic drama, Perfect Man to be greenlit and working on a number of games as well as her own first game, DARA for children with autism and a live action TV comedy drama for Deadpan Productions.

She has also had a romantic comedy broadcast on BBC Radio 4, written numerous award winning one-act stage plays - 11 productions - and had four short films produced, the latest being the award-winning Barzakh which is currently on the festival circuit.

A one hour feature, KRISTINA, was filmed in the Philippines winning a Best Film award at Swansea on Sea International Film Festival while a second feature is due to go into production late summer 2014.

Graduate of the New York University ‘Gregory Peck Scriptwriting Course’, Dublin. Scholarship, 1993 (AA Distinction). MA Screenwriting from Leeds Metropolitan University in 1999, Lindsay teaches screenwriting in Dublin, script reads for independent producers, is a graduate of Screen Training Ireland’s ‘Writing Animation’, 2003 and attended Moonstone in 2002.